With Mr DeMint's move, all of Washington's three most prominent right-leaning think tanks will have undergone regime change in recent years. The changes are telling. Arthur Brooks took the reins of The American Enterprise Institute in 2008. Mr Brooks was previously a chaired professor of public policy at Syracuse University. A protracted struggle this year and last over control of the Cato Institute's board of directors resolved with the "retirement" of Ed Crane, who had presided over Cato since its earliest days, and his replacement as president by John Allison, an incredibly wealthy former bank executive with a commitment to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. And now Heritage, which has been helmed by Ed Feulner since 1977, will take on a high-profile Republican senator as its chief. These changes in leadership speak to the character of Washington's most influential right-leaning think tanks. The wonkish professor, the Randian banker, and the establishment Republican politician each tell us something about the priorities of the institution he was been chosen to lead.

During my tenure at the Crane-era Cato Institute, the idea that Heritage had increasingly become a research and propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and therefore no longer much of an independent conservative influence on Republican politics, had become common among even right-leaning wonks and journalists. The announcement that Mr DeMint will soon take over is sure to reinforce that notion, and rightly so. Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger for the Washington Post, is distressed by this prospect:

Let me first explain why this is very bad indeed for Heritage. Even DeMint would not claim to be a serious scholar. He is a pol. He’s a pol whose entire style of conservatism—all or nothing, no compromise, no accounting for changes in public habits and opinions—is not true to the tradition of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk and others. By embracing him, Heritage, to a greater extent than ever before, becomes a political instrument in service of extremism, not a well-respected think tank and source of scholarship. Every individual who works there should take pause and consider whether the reputation of that institution is elevated or diminished by this move. And I would say the same, frankly, if any other non-scholarly pol took that spot.

Whether the reputation of Heritage "is elevated or diminished by this move" is not such a simple question. Surely the move will elevate Heritage in the estimation of millions of partisan Republicans who have barely heard of the Heritage Foundation and wouldn't know Ed Feulner from Adam. I expect that Mr DeMint, a favourite of the tea-party movement, will lead to a fund-raising bonanza. There is a clear sense in which that is very good for Heritage. That said, the institution's reputation among "thought leaders" as an independent conservative voice will surely suffer. However, as I've already suggested, this simply caps off an ongoing decline in Heritage's reputation for intellectual autonomy. Surely this will interfere with the ability of Republican operatives to pass off Heritage research as something other than self-serving partisan propaganda, but from another perspective, the advent of Heritage's DeMint era may look like the culmination of the foundation's mission. From this perspective, Heritage appears to have been so successful at exerting influence on the substance of Republican Party politics that it has become impossible to distinguish between the general stance of a dogmatically partisan conservative politician, such as Mr DeMint, and the general stance of the Heritage Foundation. Victory!

Heritage's ongoing piecemeal merger with the GOP may be a sign of corruption or success, but it's probably more-or-less inevitable. A good number of right-leaning think tanks were founded in the 1970s and 80s in large part to give conservative and libertarian intellectuals, who had struggled to find a place in academia and the mainstream media, a secure institutional perch from which to preach the gospel of "fusionist" conservatism to both the public and the complacent Republican Party establishment. For good or ill, success in this endeavour over the decades has indeed brought the GOP and many "independent" right-leaning institutions closer together. Initially, the liberal intellectual establishment at America's most prestigious universities and media outlets looked upon institutions such as Heritage with a mixture of pity and contempt. It was not until the past decade or so, when the influence of right-leaning think tanks on public and elite partisan opinion became undeniable, that the left scrambled to get into the game. When John Podesta, a White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, launched the Center for American Progress (CAP) in 2003, he was aiming to combat the influence of conservative institutions like Heritage by building a left-leaning simulacrum. As Matt Bai reported in a 2003 New York Times piece:

[Mr Podesta's] goal is to build an organization to rethink the very idea of liberalism, a reproduction in mirror image of the conservative think tanks that have dominated the country's political dialogue for a generation.

[...]

"The rise of the machinery of ideas on the right has been impressive,'' Podesta told the gathering, to nods of assent. ''People have noticed it, and we have talked about it. But we haven't really found the vehicles to compete with what's coming at us.''

Going back to Barry Goldwater, Podesta said, conservatives ''built up institutions with a lot of influence, a lot of ideas. And they generated a lot of money to get out those ideas. It didn't happen by accident. And I think it's had a substantial effect on why we have a conservative party that controls the White House and the Congress and is making substantial efforts to control the judiciary.''

Podesta laid out his plan for what he likes to call a ''think tank on steroids.'' Emulating those conservative institutions, he said, a message-oriented war room will send out a daily briefing to refute the positions and arguments of the right. An aggressive media department will book liberal thinkers on cable TV. There will be an ''edgy'' Web site and a policy shop to formulate strong positions on foreign and domestic issues. In addition, Podesta explained how he would recruit hundreds of fellows and scholars -- some in residence and others spread around the country -- to research and promote new progressive policy ideas.

The difference between Heritage and CAP is that CAP, founded by a faithful Clinton operative, has been a research and propaganda arm of the establishment Democratic Party from the very beginning. CAP was not founded to develop and propagate an upstart conception of liberalism, but to give a shot in the arm the implicit creed of the status quo Democratic Party. The prospicient Mr Podesta smartly began where Heritage has, after decades of institutional evolution, only recently arrived. Mr DeMint's Heritage will join the Center for American Progress at the in-the-pocket partisan think-tank avant garde.

I see it as the subordination of the think tank wing to the political. This was made necessary by a few absolute political debacles with the main one being Heritage pushing - properly, IMHO - the individual mandate as a conservative solution which emphasized individual responsibility and ended free loading, especially since hospital companies, which are businesses, lose money to free loaders without insurance.

But the rejection of that by the right wing of the populace and the attendant rejection of it by the right wing politician - including DeMint, who once referred to RomneyCare as "making freedom work for everyone" - means that think tanks can no longer be trusted, that they are dangerous because they can get ahead of the political party and become an embarrassment. If that weren't true, Heritage wouldn't have busily scrubbed its website of evidence of its now heresies.

They should just be sure to scrub all policies. You never know when that pesky opposition signs up for your suggestion and it has to be unpersoned or disappeared, which is another fine trait the party is borrowing from certain states.

It's hard to follow the wild swings between conservative and liberal ideas these days.

Since Republicans characterize the health insurance mandate as "socialist", and the Heritage Foundation pioneered the idea of the health insurance mandate, isn't the Heritage Foundation one of America's leading socialist institutions?

It's just an example of unprincipled pols being unprincipled pols. Both Clinton signing DOMA so it wouldn't be an issue in his reelection, and Republicans now screaming an idea they thought up is socialist, if not civilization-ending Marxist, are cases of positions taken for short-term political gain. Clinton doesn't really suffer much anymore from signing DOMA as it fades in relevance. We'll see in 20 years if anyone cares the GOP lost its collective mind over Obamacare for 4 years.

BTW, can we keep it up with these types of posts so the remnants of the low-information commenters drawn to this blog by the election go away? MS's post on epistemic closure seems to have worked pretty well.

It has been a lot nicer the last week or so. The number of comments written in all caps is way down. More obscure intellectual discourse, please. Something with "epistemological uncertainty" in the title should clear it out.

Absolutely bampbs. Where to park em?
Let’s make a deal with the Rooskies about a new American work-colony in Siberia. Ooops, was that over the top? So solly Cholly!
Well, I remember very clearly going to a DEADLY SERIOUS WDC Heritage Foundation event about fifteen years ago with lottsa luminaries, big shots, and hyper media types in breathless attendance. The ubber subject was the ABSOLUTELY eminently inevitable destiny and fate of China to soon break up into a chaos of warring states.
;-)

"in-the-pocket partisan think-tank avant garde" That's what we need. I am proud to announce formation of the Foundation for Stupidity, Stupid Studies And Scholarship (MCDPQ.) We'll promote low-information datasets and run regressions on the alphabet. 501 (c) 3 status to be pending when I get to the form. Right now I'm on 452 (c) 3 bottles of beer on the wall.

There's been a growing tendency for think tanks to be conscripted into service as full-time apologists for political parties. It's sad, but as we can now see, that's the natural trajectory for such institutions.

And will probably be so, as long as "think tanks" require their own premises and full-time staff, i.e. as long as they need lots of money.

The only people with "independent" voices today are the unemployed - whether they're unemployed because they can't get work, or because they don't need to. Everyone else is dependent.

What nonsense. Think tanks always were fake academic institutions, complete with 'research fellows' and such like, but without the independence of thought.

Simply dressed-up PR agencies; consultancies designed to sell ideas that serve the interests of who-ever funds the joint, but under the guise of independent thought and the respectability of universities.

DeMint heading one is a bad idea, as WW rightly suggests. It totally blows the cover.

I don't know they can all be painted that badly. The Rand Corporation and Brookings Institution both have very good track records and neither is overtly partisan (though at certain points in time both have leaned a bit to one side, but this has tended to correct over time).

Having been a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in the early 1960s and director of external relations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)in the 1990s, I am intimately familiar with think tanks. I have always looked upon the Heritage Foundation as primarily a grass roots lobby for "conservatism," and secondarily as a genuine policy research institute. By contrast, the work of AEI, CSIS, the Brookings Institution, and the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace is based on sound scholarship from experts with excellent academic credentials. All think tanks seek to have an impact on public policy, but some like the four organizations I mentioned above are not partisan advocacy groups like Heritage and the Center for American Progress. I expect that Heritage's reputation among knowledgeable students of public policy will decline under the leadership of Senator DeMint. At least, his departure from the Senate should benefit that institution.

At the state level (and there are free-market think tanks in all 50 states) this is playing out as well, with a range of results.

Following their most monkish, purist tendencies, think tanks sacrifice relevance for the sake of rigid ideals -- something high-dollar donors don't always have patience with, which is why you've seen Americans For Prosperity, FreedomWorks and similar organizations on the right grow very quickly on an activism-first footing.

At the other end of the scale are think tanks that have essentially given up on rigorous research and have become, instead, publishing arms (to be charitable) or noisemakers (to be more direct).

Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, had the ideal role of a think tank right: "That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Indeed. As Naomi Klein argues in The Shock Doctrine, Milton Friedman understood very well that he could hardly hope to get his radical free market ideology translated into policy in a stable democracy with a well-informed public.

It takes a crisis, so normal democratic mechanisms can be sidelined by a determined and well-prepared group.

Following Klein, one might think of the 'think tank' as the ideological equivalent of the army tank, which also has a tendency to show up in a crisis to settle a dispute by force rather than via democratic processes.

Even the best of stray for the donor dollars. William "Cancel your own goddamn subscription" Buckley failed to express his opposition to the Iraq War for the sake of his magazine and even he believed conservatism ended up paying a price for it.

So does this Think Tank think that is supportable to have a State of the Ark 'Heritage' Rail System belching out acrid smoke into the atmosphere or a State of the Art Swiss Rail system. This TT should visit Lausanne & then Chicago & dive into despair!

So does this TT also think that a State of the Ark 18th Century Heritage Political System with Members of Cabinet leading debate on their Portfolios from the Lawn (bloody cold in Winter) is supportable, or rather a State of the Art 21st Century Political System with Cabinet Members leading debate on their Portfolios from the Floor like in awesome Australia & Canada!

Not sure who Jennifer Rubin is to be criticizing anybody. I'll never recover the brain cells I lost from reading her happy talk about Romney's upcoming victory, which she learned when magic dolphins sung into her ear. Hell, DeMint is a fervent Republican but at least a man willing to dissent from party orthodoxy. Rubin prints what Karl Rove tells her to print.

If you know the outcome before you start an endeavor, it can't be research. Innovation happens were there is tolerance of conflicting views. Team thinking throughout the political spectrum appears ascendent. Shallow and useless propaganda is the predicable product.